1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the media industry and, more particularly to tracking of content in the media industry, and more specifically, enhanced systems, program products, and methods to manage media content.
2. Description of Related Art
The media industry is experiencing a profound business disruption due to the change from analog to digital business practices. This, for example, has led to a radical re-evaluation of current media management business processes, particularly in relation to the proliferation of channels, consumer devices, delivery mechanisms and rights management. Technology has moved to digital distribution of media which can be readily copied and distributed.
Authors of content need to protect their intellectual property. Equally, owners of physical property need to protect their rights. For many years, content product has relied upon physical media to contain content. If the media was secure, so were its contents. As content becomes digitized, it can be duplicated with minimal effort. Although much emphasis has been placed upon digital rights management to secure content, very little emphasis has been placed upon “derived content,” i.e., content that has been repurposed along with other content to produce new content.
Recently, digital content store systems and metadata store systems have been developed which allow some level of control over media content, e.g., songs (music and lyrics), documents, and video. Some of these systems also associate metadata with labels unrelated to content and location of the content. Such systems, however, often provide control over content in media by key codes or authorization codes to allow access to only paid users or have a preselected time frame for expiration of rights or have expiration rights upon preselected number of uses.